Taylor Swift Still Has Unfinished Business With Her Exes — Thank God! — While Also Mooning Over Her Groom in ‘The Life of a Showgirl: The Encore’: New Tracks Review

Fans of Taylor Swift may have worried throughout 2025 that marriage would soften the pop superstar's trademark bite, muting the heartbreak anthems and regret-laden confessions that fueled her ascent. The Life of a Showgirl: The Encore puts those concerns to rest. Across its four tracks, three confirm she remains firmly enrolled in the Tortured Poets society, while the odd one out, Cleveland!, showcases an equally ferocious commitment to wedded bliss, beaming with a joy potent enough to outshine her entire discography of melancholy. Consider that a fair warning.

This quartet functions as a standalone EP, her first since 2008's Beautiful Eyes, rather than a mere extension of The Life of a Showgirl, even with Max Martin and Shellback back at the controls. Swift may be hailed as the defining album artist of this century, yet there is something invigorating about a tight, easily digestible release slipped between her larger pop statements. On Patient Zero, she ties a former lover not to Tim McGraw but to hospital wards and disease outbreaks. If drawn from personal experience, the subject probably resembles the man behind You're Losing Me, the gut-wrenching bonus track documenting a long-term relationship's unraveling. Even so, Patient Zero skips along with surprising lightness, Swift proclaiming herself fully recovered and warning the man's new partner that his nice-guy routine will eventually fray. Recorded after The Life of a Showgirl's release, its production veers sharply from that album, swapping dry drums for electronic percussion and a violin-esque texture. It might pass for a stray Jack Antonoff cut, lacking the usual Martin/Shellback signatures, carrying a bittersweet, mid-tempo groove. Listeners will catch the line advising the new girlfriend to take sisterly advice from someone who had him and walked away, which narrows the suspect pool considerably. The message: she has moved on but keeps the memory mill turning, because she needs it to write songs that are not all white picket fences. And we adore a Taylor who forgives, perhaps, but never forgets. The Life of a Showgirl, released in 2024, marked Swift's eleventh studio album and continued her streak of chart-dominating records, while Beautiful Eyes arrived in 2008 as a Walmart-exclusive EP featuring alternate versions and new tracks.

Cleveland! is pure frivolity, landing somewhere between the wink-and-nod self-celebration of Me! and the pep-squad energy of So High School and Wood. Not everyone savors Taylor Swift as a love-drunk goofball, but modern streaming makes it easy to skip from track one to track three. Whether it charms or grates may take a few spins, yet any artist who finds love, especially later in life, earns the right to write a honeymoon song or ten. The infectious glee here turns some of us into patient zero for catching it. The track delights if you accept that Swift still views herself as an underdog, almost a joyous sequel to You Belong With Me. Does the woman who has ruled the planet for years still see herself as a loser pulling out a win? Apparently she has been reading the comments and quoting them back, nodding to the school of thought that she is the world's clumsiest dancer, hardly accurate but out there. Just as on Reputation she could not fathom her new boyfriend seeing past the Kanye-gate lies and loving her regardless, here she can scarcely believe Travis will not hold it against her that she is not pop's quintessential hoofer. She protests too much about what the internet holds against her, but she has been to Cleveland Heights now, where there are also non-ballerinas, and made herself at home. It is sweet. Musically, Martin, Shellback, and Swift switch gears again with live-sounding drum rolls, contrasting the electronic rhythms of Patient Zero. Floating above those drums is a keyboard line lifted straight from late-'80s synth-pop, though A Flock of Seagulls would never have gotten prosaic enough to offer a spoken monologue like: You only need to find one person in this entire world who doesn't find you completely insufferable, and I have an important announcement to make — I found mine. Now, will we get an exclamatory Florida!!!/Cleveland! mashup on the next tour? Cleveland Heights, a suburb of Cleveland, Ohio, has a population of roughly 45,000 and is known for its diverse architecture and cultural scene, adding a personal touch to Swift's reference.

Pink Clouding presents itself as the finest of the four on first blush, though it is nearly a tie with the final two. The lush, overdubbed vocals that herald the track, followed by a steady pulse and cheerfully boomy undercurrents, make it sound like a Lover track or even a 1989 outtake. It is one of Swift's regret songs, in the lineage of the more somber Back to December, a done-somebody-wrong number where the singer sounds wistful about the boy she ghosted, disappearing from a cloud they were mutually enjoying. One recovery center defines pink cloud syndrome as a temporary phase of intense euphoria, optimism and overconfidence experienced during the early stages of addiction recovery. In other words, maybe the pink cloud she hopped onto with the guy in question was a getaway car. Euphoria is something some Swifties may experience with this one on repeat, even if it means to be a cautionary tale. All these years into her career, with the stereotype that she writes primarily vindictively still refusing to die in some circles, it is still disarming to hear her put her guard down and confess: Neither of us knew at the time that I was a liar… Years later, I still wonder how to tell you sorry…. I wake up scared that I left scars on a good person. Nobody needs to worry that all that time spent screaming over touchdowns and penalties has knocked the shockingly tender poetry out of her. Swift's ability to blend personal confession with universal themes has been a hallmark since her 2006 debut, and tracks like Pink Clouding reinforce why she remains a singular voice in pop songwriting.

Babylon, the most lyrically elusive song of the fresh quartet, is as mysterious as Cleveland! is determinedly simple. Is Babylon anything like Wonderland? And to quote one instant tweet from a literalist within minutes of the song going live: Who the hell is Aunt Virginia? It gets back to her roots right at the top with an acoustic guitar that briefly seems to place it in Aaron Dessner territory, or maybe the real backdating should be to White Horse, since Swift seems to be referencing it when she writes, That small town's even smaller now in your rear view, a pretty clear callback. Again, the sound is fuller here, more suggestive and resonant, than on most of the dialed-down original Showgirl tracks. The meaning is difficult to parse right in the moment, but there are superior lines to pick out: You ran with all the wild things / A liberated libertine who longed for home. Is that Swift talking about herself in her immediate pre-Travis days, when she was running with one hell of a seeming wild thing? Love is ice upon the ladder that you need to climb is a whoa moment. And she has not written many better one-liners than: The self-harm of never being where you are. It sounds most like a song of empathy, maybe partly directed at herself but more apparently written in a loving manner for an ex she once would have killed with a thousand cuts but now has some real sympathy for. We can appreciate that it is Cleveland! that gives her life, but part of her heart is still with the ones in Babylon, a path not taken on the way to MSG. Aaron Dessner, a member of The National and a frequent Swift collaborator, has co-produced several of her albums, including Folklore and Evermore, bringing a indie-folk sensibility that echoes in Babylon's acoustic opening.